


Triangulate

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Bourne (Movies), The Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Competence Porn, Developing Relationship, F/M, Head Injury, M/M, Multi, Teamwork, concussed character, love in the time of spies is complicated, outcome 3 is peter boyd, outcome 3 survives, reference to deleted scenes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-03-06 15:58:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18854314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: An AU take on the events of the movie, in which Outcome 3 has a name, a shared sense of paranoia, and a concussion.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Among the deleted scenes list for Bourne Legacy, I read a description of one that flat-out stated Aaron Cross was not the only Outcome agent with habits formed from paranoia, with hoarded money, IDs, and supplies stashed here and there in case they might be needed. Such a little thing could easily be the difference between life and death, don’t you think?

In Aaron’s defense, he’d seen the aftermath of drone strikes far too many times to expect anything more than a stain on the melted snow.  He’d been far enough away, just barely, to survive the shockwave, but that had been nothing more than blind luck and he knew it. Aaron Cross learned long, long before Outcome that luck was not something that could ever be depended on, no more than successfully calling a hundred coin tosses _while_ being struck by lightning.    

That said, just because something was unfathomably rare and unreliable didn’t mean it was _impossible_.  

  


\--

  


The cabin is scrap.  The snow has nearly extinguished everything down to damp splinters, all wet and hissing softly.  Aaron allows himself a breath, just one breath; notsomuch sorrow, only a quiet _damn_.  He never got a name, but a day’s worth of being around another human being had been… well.  Damn.

Part of a rifle stock here, fragmented white and blue plastic on the snow, silvery wires from the radio, pieces of the transmission tower’s frame… but there’s still a few things lightweight enough to survive the blast, and Aaron’s mind clicks easily over into scavenging what he can, what he immediately _needs_.  Gauze and tape (the boxes are damp but they’re still whole), handwarmers, two un-dented tins of--

A bit of orange plastic catches his eye, and Aaron’s heart sinks.  Shattered orange pill bottles, smears of blue and green in the snow.   _Shit_.  He drops his salvage, sinks to his knees to scratch frantically at the slush and ice--

\--and sinks, and _falls_.  The surge of panic in his stomach becomes a lurch of gravity, and Aaron’s falling through snow and mud.  It’s only about eight feet, but he lands sideways on something that _clangs_ under his weight and kicks most of the breath from his lungs.  

It’s not as bad as another shockwave, but it’s not _fun_.  Aaron sucks air, shakes his head, blinks to quickly acclimate his eyes to his surroundings.  Dirt, torn soil. The dust of disturbed rock. He’s in a root cellar, a narrow hall sliced into the earth, with dull daylight filtering in from the ruined ceiling over Aaron’s head.  Underneath, he recognizes the grayish metal of the outdoor storage unit where the chems had been kept, but all banged up and dented to hell. Half the shelves to the left and right of him are already fallen, spilling stacks of foil-wrapped MREs, jars of coffee, of… of--

Slithery, slick paper blend, a unique texture under Aaron’s right hand.  

He grips it, brings it into the light, and finds himself staring at a muddy, dusty hundred-pound British banknote.  There’s a mess of them, spilling out of metal box that’s broken open on the floor, right alongside a small bundle of red Canadian fifties in a clear plastic bag.  One of the shelves ripped a hole in the dirt wall when it fell, maybe knee-height from the floor. Aaron carefully pushes his fingers through the clutter of roots and cold soil, and hits smooth, creased plastic.  There’s dollars, pounds, euros. Prepackaged receipts, pre-wrinkled and dusted with lint to look convincingly real. Keys, clustered separately with a colour-coded plastic tag apiece. Two wallets, fat with cards and photos.  A Canadian passport, a British one, but the covers are both out of date by three years.

Aaron smiles, just a twitch.   _Sonofabitch._

And then the metal underneath him lifts slightly.  Groans.

 

\--

 

“You smell like wet dog.”

“You’re not hallucinating, so the concussion might not be too bad.”  There’s a snort, then a snip of scissors through medical tape. The splint on his right wrist feels like wooden slats and a folded sheet, wrapped snug.  Another on his right knee, colder. Metal struts. Pieces of the transmission tower. “Broken wrist, wrenched knee.” A hesitation, fabric whispering like a shrug, and then there’s warmth pressing carefully on a patch of skin he hadn’t realized was cold.  “Minor flesh wound on the hip, though apparently I shouldn’t have bothered. You landed pretty hard.”

His eyes are taking too long to focus.  There’s a bare hand holding something small and gray in front of his face, and it takes decided effort to move his left hand to take it.

He knows this thing, this object.  Even with fuzz in his head and pain thumping dully against the side of his skull, he knows it.  He’d felt it under his skin between heartbeats, just a… a _pressure_ against his cells, a foreign thing, faint as a thread but unbreakable.  The casing ( _like a pill.  what time is it?  two-fifty milligrams blue, four hundred green.  what time?_ ) is cracked now, with blood dried brown on the inside.  Contents inert. Dead.

He lets it fall from his fingers.  Tries to sit up, fails when the nausea hits him like a missile all over again.  

“Hey.  Hey hey hey.”  Hands on his face.  Callused ( _rifle, gloves_ , _smells like dog_ ) but light, touching his brows.  “Shit. Your eyes.”

He blinks, and the face staring down at his own brings a sudden flood of information, like a skipping stone spreading ripples over water ( _flowing river outside the cabin door, six months, six months here alone_ ).  The asset ( _man, Aaron, hand offering to shake_ ) arriving two days early, the wolves ( _you think too much_ ), the heavy snow and the distant drone that shouldn’t be coming yet ( _what did you do? turn down an assignment? start thinking for yourself?_ ), and he’d known in his gut, he’d _known_.  It was time ( _bug-out_ ).  Too risky to trust Aaron, the other asset with blue eyes and a name and too many questions, but if Aaron was going to the nest, then there was a window of opportunity to get to the--

To get the--

“Yeah.  Your right eye’s dilated all to hell.  Shit. Try not to move.” Aaron carefully eases him back down to a bed of pine boughs and smoke-stained blankets over cold ground, and sits close enough to block the light wind.  No fire, but weak daylight illuminating two packs leaned together, the firewood sledge, and a bend in the river recognizable as seventeen miles downstream from the cabin. “Still.  It would’ve been a lot worse if you hadn’t been heading for that root cellar.”

And there it is.  He can’t help the way his eyes flick up, the way his stomach drops all over again, the way he watches Aaron’s eyes sharpen with interest, watches Aaron’s posture lean slightly forward ( _fell in love? you fell in love_ ).  Doesn’t say anything.  Doesn’t need to.

He’s concussed and wounded, a liability.  He might have been pulled from field duty, but he remembers regular field procedure, and dragging possibly hostile dead weight along is certainly not it, let alone bedside care.  Wetting his lips and inhaling breath feels like falling through the root cellar ceiling, stability gone, map blown to hell. “Still think I’m evaluating you?” It’s softer than expected, just laid out between the two of them like a pistol that was better against wolves.  

Wolves ( _you smell like wet dog_ ).  It’s quiet now, with only the creaking of the trees and the river’s murmur.  

“Nope.”  Aaron’s voice is low, soft.  Relieved? Why would he be relieved?  “Chicago,” Aaron says.

“What?”

“My root cellar.  It’s in Chicago.”

Oh.  He feels his shoulders relax, _truly_ relax, and understands right then why Aaron’s eyes had lit up ( _i have never met anybody in the program before_ and _you and i_ and _talk to me_ ). For a moment, his pain lessens enough to let him think.

He doesn’t need Aaron to sketch out hypotheticals.  The drone strike, the cabin, the beacon, and the fact that Aaron isn’t constantly checking the perimeter; even to his battered head, the working theory looks pretty clear.  They’re burned, and the ground under their feet has been violently salted beyond the point of salvage. “Someone fucked up.”

“Someone fucked up.  But not you. And not me.”  Aaron sips water from a canteen.  “So they fucked up three times by my count.”

Something ticks over in the air, and he reaches for the pillbox chain at his neck.  Aaron offers him the canteen, watches as the pills go down, stay down, and he manages to drink all of it.  The water tastes like steel and snow, soothes some of the nausea, though his head still feels too hot and too small.  Every thought is still dragged through the debris of the cabin before getting as far as speaking aloud, but... he feels good.  If this is how it’s going to go, it feels good to not be so very, so suddenly alone ( _again_ ).

“I salvaged what I could carry.”  There’s a hesitation in Aaron’s voice, so he opens his eyes and does his best to focus on Aaron’s face and words.  “The program meds are gone. There’s whatever you have on you, and now I’ve got less than three blues worth that I picked out of the snow.”  

 _I’ve got a real problem here_ , Aaron had said, and soon it’ll be his problem, too.  The tick of his heartbeat is pounding, pounding, slowly swelling against the inside of his skull to strangle his brain.  He smells blood, feels the crackle of it dried on his upper lip, pressing under and around his eyes. More than what a pill might fix, maybe.  Either way, in three days, he’ll know. “Shit.”

“There’s gotta be more than just you and me.”  The tension in Aaron’s voice sounds like resolve, but it’s not.  It’s drawn tightly around Aaron’s eyes like tripwires, coiling in the hands that aren’t quite fists.  Not panic. Not yet. “Another one of us could have made it out. Support staff, handlers… drop sites.  They could still be out there. Or whoever it was who knew enough to pull the plug. Them.”

A pinch of worry kicks at his stomach before training smothers it down.   _Support staff._ How deeply had someone fucked up?  How wide was the blast radius, the burn scar?  Had there been any warning? Any time to get away?  Part of him wishes he could feel more than forced detachment, part of him _remembers…_ but he can’t.  Can’t and won’t, not yet.  “Do your plans always involve running directly at the most difficult target?”  

It’s enough to jolt an amused snort out of Aaron.  “I guess they do.”

It’s not like he can offer much of an alternative, not the way his head is spinning.  “Landing strip,” he offers. “Private. Not… not theirs. Southeast.” How many miles?  He can’t remember how many miles. “Follow the river.” His voice rasps, drags clumsily on his tongue.  He’s tired. Aaron will go ( _get ahead of it_ ).  

“Take a few hours.  We can try that knee of yours, see how well you can move.”

Oh.  ( _no, it's too late for that.  just stick around_.)  Had he said that?  He’d said that. ( _just stick around.  I’ve got you covered._ )  And now Aaron’s saying that.  They’ll go.

He can sleep a little if the concussion is this bad, but only a little.  Might not wake up. “Peter,” he slurs, fighting and losing the battle of lethargy.  “It’s my… I’m Peter.” Not that it’s his real name, only the last one he’d been given.  Not that anyone’s called him that for more than half a year. It still feels strange on his tongue, unused.  Neglected. He doesn’t know what it will sound like when Aaron calls him that.

The names scratched in the bunk slats are burned up, gone, gone ( _how many of us are there?_ ). The others, the ones he’d never met.  They’re gone. So he says it. Carves it into the empty air between them.  Just in case. “Peter Boyd.”

Aaron’s face loses a degree of tension.  The lines beside his eyes soften, or perhaps that’s just the unconsciousness crowding in fast, blurring the world outside.  Peter registers the weight of a warm hand on his shoulder, then the weight of everything else on his head, and he sleeps, sleeps.  


	2. Chapter 2

The concussion is… bad.  

The pressure behind Peter’s eyes is worse when he wakes, but he can put weight on his knee.  He can walk, which means he will walk, as long as he needs to. There’s something reassuring in keeping his un-splinted hand on Aaron’s shoulder and just...  following. It’s familiar, in that once upon a time _before_ sort of way; before Outcome, before everything became _louder_ and _faster_ and more _now_.  He disconnects thought from movement, head from body ( _march, soldier_ ).  

Time comes and goes.  It’s reassuring, and it’s also not.  There’s no way to tell how much of it is due to damage and pain he’s just tuned out.

With one blink, there’s cold morning rain misting his face, softening the salt sting of blood leaking from his nose.  In the next, they’re crossing a field at a ground-eating jog, and his wrenched knee twinges at him from a thousand miles away.  If they stop at all to rest, Peter can’t remember. He follows that smell Aaron carries, and maybe he hallucinates wolves running silently beside them.  

( _your friends are here_ )

In another blink, there’s hard asphalt under his boots and some pebbled broken glass, and the wet dog smell is overpowered by gasoline and metal.  A sudden shriek of Velcro makes him flinch, but it’s only Aaron wrapping a proper wrist brace on him, the molded plastic like ice after being kept in an airplane hangar for months on end.  Aaron with a weather-stained white plastic box by his elbow, the red cross symbol faded orange-pink. Aaron checking his eyes with a dim penlight, frowning. Aaron offering water when Peter reaches for his pillbox and swallows his second-last set of green and blue.  Aaron carefully tapping his own blue into his palm, shrunken slightly and dye made sticky with snow.

Aaron helping him up into a dirty white Helio Courier ( _fast, better range than the Cessna, or had there been a Cessna? had the Cessna been in Baja?_ ) with old, flattened cushioning in the seats.  The headset, however necessary, is pressure upon pressure around Peter’s skull.  His stomach churns as they take off, but nothing more.  

He’s been concussed before, though he can’t remember exactly when.  He remembers just enough to know that this… this is bad. Even for them.

( _maybe they don’t think you’re human_ )

Worry starts to grow in his gut, cold and sick and metallic like the blood from his nose.  The hard wall of detachment Peter so painstakingly built is getting slippery ( _snow melting under the rocket fire, sinking, sinking into the root cellar and the dark_ ) but he can’t let it fall yet.  Can’t and won’t.  

It’s a long flight from Alaska to anywhere else.  The buzzy roar of the plane becomes white noise after five minutes, too much like the hiss of wind and the stabbing glare of sunlight into Peter’s mismatched eyes.  His knee throbs, the makeshift brace gone, now bent up and held in place in the cramped cockpit. Every inch of him wants to sleep, for all that he knows it’s the last thing he should do with a head injury, and if he knows it, then Aaron knows it.  

So Aaron talks.  

“So.  Who was it?”

Peter’s eyes sliver open, just enough to glare. 

“Hey, I said ‘some other time’.”  Aaron shrugs, like it’s only words.  “Figured this is as good a time as any.  Who was it? How’d you fall in love?” 

Asked like someone that doesn’t know, couldn’t know.  Peter wants to punch him in the nose. He settles for glowering at the river they’re following, so low they’re barely above the trees.  They’ll find the railway line from here, and then follow it southeast, inland.   

He can still see Aaron’s face at the very edge of his peripheral vision, and Aaron smiles, just a little.  It lightens his face, suggests that he might know laughter, real laughter, not just the kind that’s a tool in an asset’s arsenal.  “You know, if I really wanted to be an asshole, all I’ve gotta do is play twenty questions some more. Your poker face isn’t nearly as good as you think it is.”

Peter keeps glaring.

“ _Obviously_ , otherwise you wouldn’t have been given cabin duty.”  Despite the world falling out from under them, Aaron’s _smirking_.  “Twenty questions it is.  So… man or woman?”

Peter rolls his eyes.

“Huh.  Okay. Civilian or in-house?”

Peter sighs, tries to shift his knee into a better position, and regrets it.  

“ _Huh._   Was it an assignment?”  

 _(end it_ )  Peter flinches.  His head is stuffed full of pain and swelling, but he feels the flinch tighten every bit of his face like it’ll make another bruise.  (end it, _they’d said, like flipping off a light switch, like cutting off a limb_ )

 _(march, soldier_ )

Of course Aaron sees.  Peter watches Aaron’s smile fall, watches the lines around his eyes settle into a hint of guilt like a familiar trench.  In their language, it’s as good as an apology.  

They fly in silence for a little while.  

Somewhere along the line of it, Peter had begun to wonder if getting punished hadn’t been a deliberate choice on his part.  There would always be a mark on his file hidden somewhere deep in some director’s filing cabinet, a scar for the hurt, like all the other assets carving the only name they remembered into the wooden bunk of a cabin; _this existed_ , _once._ _This mattered, once_.  

( _still does_ )

The river crosses under the railway line, and the sun tracks warmth over Peter’s face as they turn.  East-southeast. Into Canada, into British Columbia, and maybe they’ll make it into Washington state if they have the fuel and the weather holds.  Maybe not.

When Peter feels his eyes start to flag, Aaron talks some more.  “Do you know who started the cellar?”

It shouldn’t feel safer to talk about this instead, but it does.  He fights through the blurry weight of his own tongue and carefully shapes the words.  “No. I found it two weeks after I was posted.” There’d been a heavy rain, saturating the muskeg and swelling the river.  The weight of a jar of venison had pulled a shelf from the softened earth just as Peter had opened the cellar door, spilling the bolt-hole contents at his feet.  

It made a sort of sense at the time, seeing all the components he would need for self-extraction in the unlikely (but not impossible) case of internal compromise or total support failure, so he patched up the wall, reinforced the shelf, and added a few fresh components from his meagre stores.  

Peter isn’t an idiot; he doesn’t know the numbers, but he can smell the money invested in his training, in his… his _creation_ , lacking a better word.  He is an asset. An expensive tool in an exclusive arsenal.  To survive means he is hardwired to protect his country’s investment, in every meaning of the word.

Apparently, the sentiment isn’t reciprocated. 

“You didn’t call it in.”

“No.”  Because of course, that would defeat the point of it in the first place.

Aaron’s shoulders relax a fraction, just enough for Peter to tell.  “I was starting to wonder if it was something they’d programmed into us, you know?  Or something they couldn’t program out. I needed to have that possibility accounted for, even if it never came up.”

Peter lifts a brow, all that he has the energy to lift.  

The headset turns Aaron’s sardonic snort mostly into static.  “Yeah. Right. _If_.”

 

\--

 

Neither of them need to state their destination out loud.  Aaron’s cache is in Chicago, so they’re going to Chicago.

It’s occurred to Aaron (meaning it’s also occurred to Peter, concussion be damned) that their current plan has problems, the least of which being limited resources, even taking into account the cache he has waiting for him.  Aaron learned right at the start that he couldn’t hoard program medication; missing even one dose had left a drag on his reaction time and plaque coating his concentration, just like his training officers had described. The very thought of it now is enough to send a chill through his gut.  Maybe the others could handle it, but not him.  

They need information.  They need _something_ to go on, nevermind the silence, the utter _lack_ of intel to suggest anything resembling context for why they’ve been burned. There’s a chance they might be flying into World War III, or an assassinated administration, or a military coup.  Is there anyone left to serve? To trust? Anyone left that knows them? Every possibility is there, and it’s honestly a toss-up as to which prospect is the most bleak.  

All the same, it’s easier not being alone. 

Peter’s nosebleeds and confusion worry Aaron more than the wrenched knee and broken wrist.  They’re trained to take it and fake it, to stuff pain and shock down and keep going, but Aaron can still see the way Peter’s eyes unfocus, the way his brows flinch when he realizes he’s lost an hour, two hours, four hours in a blink, with the gauze held to his nose gone thoroughly red.  Triage in the field is one thing, but a concussion severe enough to slow an asset this badly needs more than a half-dozen ibuprofen from a stolen first aid kit and a ‘walk it off’. Nothing short of a qualified doctor can tell them whether he’s bleeding into his brain, and nothing short of a program doctor can say what will happen if he runs out of meds in the middle of it.  If the pressure inside his skull gets to the point of seizures, then they’ll have to… _Aaron_ will have to--

No.  Not there yet.  

It just feels so _good_ , having that string of human connection gently tugged back.  Peter’s humour is driest of the dry, never more than a word or two, or just a glare if his headache is too intense for speaking.  Aaron knew he’d been starving for a presence at his side that wasn’t composed of flat orders or justified lies, but he could survive.  He’d been built to function in a hostile vacuum of humanity, to work through it, to make do without.

( _we are the sin-eaters_ )

But still.  He remembered.  He’d tried.

( _is that why you make such an attractive appearance?_ )

Oh, he’d tried, like he might make the sun shine if he just asked nicely.  

And now, every snort, every monosyllable, every faint, faint smile, it’s like the stars coming out one by one.  His world’s been literally blown to shit and back ( _again_ ), but how long has it _been_ , since he’s had a friend?

They land in a cleared field on the outskirts of Prince George.  Aaron steals a truck for them from a camping ground’s parking lot.  After hours in a cramped cockpit, Peter’s knee doesn’t want to un-bend without help, so they wedge the backpacks full of cash and spare clothes under Peter’s foot and a sleeping bag under the knee to soften any jostles.  He’s sweating out the pain, eyes still mismatched and glassy, but never makes a sound.

Aaron remembers the wolf, one last time.  

Aaron drives through the darkening evening until he needs to stop for a half-hour of sleep.  They fill up on gas at a tiny station that smells like fish bait, pay with cash, then keep going.  

The truck’s shitty radio doesn’t get much more than static, and the gas station only sells out-of-date hunting magazines, so for hours there’s just... nothing.  There’s a regular stream of semitrailers and fully-laden logging trucks on the highway, coming and going, and a smattering of smaller vehicles that increases with daylight.  They pass by a rest stop area packed with campers and families and a man smoking a morning cigarette as he walks an overweight dog on a patch of grass. It’s all normal, all benign and sterile and safe in that way that doesn’t really apply to Aaron or Peter anymore.  

They drive.  They stop for another half hour of sleep in the parking lot of a truck stop and Aaron shaves his beard in the bathroom that smells like pine.  They ditch the truck and pick up a dark blue sedan. They stop in a smaller town where a used bookstore offers passport photos. Peter flicks through the radio stations as they wait and finally catches the tail-end of a report on a workplace shooting that segues into the next item.

There’s no mention of any military movement, or shocking assassinations, only national sports and local politics.  The world is still turning.  

In a way, it’s chilling.  Banality doesn’t mean their options are at all improved, only that the situation that necessitated their deaths is being kept close to the vest.  Things ( _assets, missions, evidence, people_ ) are being buried, and if Aaron and Peter want to maintain the advantage of being _believed_ dead, they need to keep up that facade of banality in kind.  

But if they want answers, if they want assets of their own… then they need to get in close to that vest.

World War III might have been easier, all things considered.  Not preferable, of course, but easier.  

They cross into the United States north of Hansboro, North Dakota, with the Canadian passport from Peter’s cellar and the American one Aaron kept in the lining of his jacket.  The sedan hasn’t been reported stolen, but it’s only dumb, desperate luck that Peter’s nose stops bleeding just long enough to get them through.  

They stop for more gas in Rocklake, and swallow their respective pills with stale gas station coffee.  Aaron forces himself not to react when Peter hesitates with his blue and green, glances at Aaron’s single remaining blue, calculating the hours elapsed and remaining, the chances, the odds of survival ( _together, alone_ ).

Aaron can’t react, can’t and won’t, because neither of them can afford to lose momentum, just like climbing _over_ the mountain instead of around it.  They’ll find a way.

( _just stick around, i’ve got you covered_ )

They drive, and drive, and then the city limits for Chicago brightly ahead of them, and Aaron needs to decide where they’re going, after.

“Where’d you check in?”  It’s the most words Peter’s managed to say in one go without slurring since that first stop by the river, almost two days ago.  The passing streetlights and cars are too bright, and his eyes are closed.

( _white walls, steel trays, gentle hands bracing his head_ )  

“Baltimore.  You?”

“DC.”

Aaron almost winces for him.  Without time to plan, and without the program medication to buy it, Washington DC is the lion’s den.  Littered with paper. Bones. Ghosts. If they were angry, perhaps it would be their target, but--

Well.  Aaron doesn’t feel that kind of angry.  He glances at Peter, but the sheen of sweat and the stress shadows around his eyes… that isn’t anger, either.  

They pass through the tollway on Interstate 90, and Peter's pain-rasped drawl pushes on.  “Go to Baltimore. The check-in site. Your best shot. We’re… we’re ’sspend’ble, but the science, the docs.  If they keep anything, if there’s… if there’s chems, maybe there.”

Aaron doesn’t say anything.  Peter’s not wrong, but there’s… things missing, between the words.  Things not being said. Not yet. Just… not yet.

It’s not until after they get to Aaron’s cache car when the plan gets completely fucked, anyway.  

Peter catches a glimpse of a headline on a bale of newspaper, waiting on the pavement for pre-dawn delivery.  He rises as Aaron pulls up to the curb, then stops and doesn’t look away. Aaron cracks his window and looks. Looks again, and his stomach drops.

 _Investigation Continues in Tragic Lab Shooting_ screams the letters on the front page, over a photograph crowded with police cars and security uniforms.  The photo is blurry, but there’s more than enough resolution to take in the pale, slight woman being escorted out a door with a familiar logo, a familiar shape.  He takes in the dark hair, the dark, wide eyes, and his mind _races_ with sudden imperative.  

( _what do you think we do, out there?_ )

“Not Baltimore.  Lisbon.” Peter’s jaw is set, his eyes fever-bright but focused through sheer force of will.  He limps to the passenger-side seat and slams the door hard enough for Aaron to feel it. “Carrs Mill Road, Lisbon.”

Now.  Now, Peter looks angry.


End file.
